Bradley T Hughes has implemented multihead support for KDE 2.1, and is currently commiting the code. This is one fine feature masquerading as a bugfix but which should make a lot of people with multiple monitors quite happy.

This is a feature that kept my company from using KDE on our desktops. And now
that we are entrechec in SawFish and Gnome
It will probably stay that way. I really like
KDE and KDE2 but I never understood why no
multihead support.

Geez, he makes an obviously sarcastic comment about the original commenter's irrational fear of trying to install something different, and people somehow manage to misunderstand him. That doesn't make him a troll.

it will ship in 2.1 final (as it is bugfix ;o) ). actually the mailing-list was quite funny to read there: yes! look at this! i found a bug-report for this!
Therefore obviously it's a bug we *need* to correct, not a new feature ;o)

Multihead is a general term to mean the support of several monitors. But there are two ways of doing that.

The simplest one (NO xinerama) is one X display per monitor. e.g. you can do
xterm -display :0.0 -> goes on the first monitor
xterm -display :0.1 -> goes on the 2nd
etc... but you can't move a window from a monitor to another.

The other one, xinerama, is all the monitors merged into one large X display. E.g. you can freely move one window from a monitor to another.

Xinerama is already working for KDE 2.1 (and every version of KDE) as it doesn't require anything special from the application. It just displays on something big.

As I understand this patch, it means the support of several displays, which is really nice to have as well. (somebody correct me if I'm wrong).

Puh :) - now I realized, that I wasnt using Xinerama with e. It seems to have automagically
detected the second display and extended itself to it, opening a second window manager (or whatever).

But now I fear that my KDE compilation is broken, because it doesnt seem to be aware of xinerama at all. It opens applications between the two monitors and maximises across both screens. The panel is stretched to the second display, but doesnt show up there, so I cant use the left side, no edge resistance...

If its not my compilation: Is it possible to open a second KDE instance in the second monitor in basic multihead, not using xinerama?

Puh :) - now I realized, that I wasnt using Xinerama with e. It seems to have automagically
detected the second display and extended itself to it, opening a second window manager (or whatever).

But now I fear that my KDE compilation is broken, because it doesnt seem to be aware of xinerama at all. It opens applications between the two monitors and maximises across both screens. The panel is stretched to the second display, but doesnt show up there, so I cant use the left side, no edge resistance...

If its not my compilation: Is it possible to open a second KDE instance in the second monitor in basic multihead, not using xinerama?

Thank you! My G400 will be pleased. I've been trying to run Enlightenment w/ KDE 2.1 in order to get some multi-head awareness, but have run into numerous problems w/ virtual desktops working right between the two. Bummer. I liked the KDE/E combo.

some matrox cards (i don't think other manufacturors support that?) have two video outputs.
one for a normal monitor, some for a TFT/flat screen/TV. I hear recent one support two monitors as well.
Of course this is way cool, and different from Xinerama, which is having two monitors with *two* video cards.

Umm... I suppose it might be possible, but it would certainly be pointless. This isn't about virtual desktops or the like, it's solely about supporting multiple physical monitors correctly (not opening windows with odd overlaps across the boundary, etc). So, if you don't have a multihead setup, it means nothing at all to you.

I assume this will fix the bug when running KDE apps remotely, the apps they spawn sometimes decide to appear on the local console instead of the remote host that should be getting them. (For example, viewing an attachment in kmail).

I've got KDE 2.1 beta2 running with xinerama and 2 screens on a Matrox G450. Will this patch recognize the two screens of my desktop and maximize a window only on one screen? Can windows be aligned at both sides of each screen?

I am currently running multihead on my linux box with 2 video cards; a radeon 32mb and an xpert98 16mb. It locks up KDE on initialization and works well until I run an app on Gnome. Any ideas what I might have configured wrong?

Hi, I am fairly new to KDE, and I have a Geforce 4 ti 4400, and It has support for two monitors, and I was just wondering if there was a patch or a program so I can have dual monitor w/o having to buy a second video card? If anyone can help that would be greatly appreciated. Thx